Interview: Cold in Gardez's The Wind Thief · 3:29am Nov 27th, 2013
The Wind Thief is the only crossover I love as much as Fallout: Equestria, and after talking with Cold in Gardez, I'm not surprised: the things I love about one are the things I love about the other, and he intended it that way from the beginning.
The Wind Thief by Cold in Gardez
Plot Summary: Skyrim crossover. When a thieving unicorn is arrested, she gains Princess Celestia’s attention by claiming to be the dragonborn. Celestia gives her a quest: guard her faithful student through a cursed dungeon to retrieve the Wind’s Eye, an artifact with the power to end the threat of the dragons.
Why I liked it: The Wind Thief doesn’t try to be a novelization of Skyrim, and it doesn’t try to be a sprawling 300,000 word epic either. Instead, it tells a self-contained, 68,000 word story about an original character, set in a fused MLP/Skyrim world that captures the essential elements of each universe.
From the Skyrim half, we have a land locked in perpetual winter, the return of the dragons, a dungeon-crawling hero, draugr fights, dragon shouts, and treasure. From the MLP half, we have Twilight Sparkle and Celestia each playing a role basically identical to in the show, and Luna, whose story is both the same and different from canon. It also helps that the main character bears many similarities to Trixie. After reading it, I feel as if I had an authentic Skyrim experience, but I also understand some of my favourite ponies better than I did before.
There’s a lot to love about this story. The romantic subplot between Sly and Twilight was great, and the fight scenes cool and meaningful without being repetitive. But my favourite part was the scope of it all. What initially appears as a trek through a single small tomb turns into something much more. Not only is the tomb far more vast than expected, we also unravel layer upon layer of history as they delve deeper: Sly remembers her childhood, Twilight tells of the origins of the Wind’s Eye and what happened to Luna, and they ultimately discover how the tomb’s guardians came to be cursed and why there’s a tomb there in the first place.
Questions
1. What inspired you to write The Wind Thief? Why a Skyrim crossover? Why one that isn’t about the dragonborn? And why write about a single quest through a single dungeon rather than a sprawling epic like Fallout Equestria?
The simplest answer is that Skyrim had just come out, and I was looking to write an adventure/crossover-style story. Kkat’s monumental Fallout: Equestria story was drawing to a close at the time, and her style of crossover was another significant inspiration: rather than simply rewriting an existing story with ponies, take the essence of that story – the return of an ancient foe, a land locked in winter, a world where the past is at war with the present – and infuse it into the ponies that we know and love.
Is Sly the Dragonborn? Maybe. She’ll certainly tell you she is, but then, she’s not exactly someone you’d trust with your 401k. Ultimately, that’s not a critical part of the story. Instead it focuses on her and Twilight’s search for an ancient artifact in a tomb that turns out to be far larger and more dangerous than they expected. Rather than trying to follow Kkat’s epic (and exhausting) opus, I wanted a relatively small, self-contained story that could be expanded with sequels if I wanted.
2. Sly reminds me of Trixie: light blue unicorn, boastful, antagonistic towards Twilight. But instead of calling her Trixie, as I think many authors would have (canon characters usually being more popular than OCs), you made her an OC. Why? And when you’re writing a crossover or AU, how you do decide when to fill a role with an OC and when to repurpose a canon character?
I never honestly made the connection between Sly and Trixie until people started pointing it out in the comments. Now, of course, it seems obvious.
Sly is loosely based off my playstyle in Skyrim; an archer who prefers to stick to the shadows, with only as much magic as necessary to get by in a dangerous world. She’s also a bit of a kleptomaniac who uses her massive ego as a shield against her insecurities, and it’s that last part that I think leads people to comparisons with Trixie.
As for deciding whether to use an OC or canon character, my main consideration is usually how much my intended character will depart from the characters established in the show. Readers in this fandom are generally very protective of their ‘headcanon’ for a given character, and woe betide the author who upsets them. If you’re going in an unusual direction, it’s often better to make a new character from scratch than to try fitting a square Twilight Sparkle into a round hole.
That said, I used Twilight Sparkle as the primary supporting character, and I left her generally unchanged from what we see in the show. She’s still a bookish, powerful magic user without much experience in the real world or with other ponies. Part of the fun of writing is seeing how an established character like her will fit into the new world I've created.
3. Some parts of your story are predictable: Twilight and Sly are going to be shipped. They’re going to survive the dungeons and find the Wind’s Eye. Other parts, less so, like the wish, the origin of the dungeons, and what happens with Celestia at the end. But to make a satisfying ending, you have to deliver on the implicit promises your story made at the beginning; some parts of your story have to be predictable. How do you keep things new and interesting while still providing a resolution that satisfies reader expectations?
There’s an implicit agreement between writers and their readers regarding main characters. If it’s a tragedy, the reader knows to expect a bad ending. If it’s pretty much any other story, they know to expect a good ending. If you give readers the opposite ending from what they expect, you’re in for a rough ride.
The fun in subverting expectations is how you deliver those endings. For example, most people would consider dying to be an unhappy ending. But it’s just as easy to imagine a story that ends with the main character’s death, but also in their victory. For a pop-culture example, consider the fate of Bruce Willis’s character in Armageddon. For a more literate example, consider the fate of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, who volunteers to be executed in the place of another man whom he judges to deserve life more.
The Wind Thief’s ending was mixed for our heroes. They did get the Wind’s Eye, yes, but not in the way they expected. Likewise, they both survived, though again not as expected. They do have a relationship, but it’s not clear that they’ll be making kissy-faces with each other anytime soon.
4. The Wind Thief is your third most popular story, after “Naked Singularity” and “The Contest”, and it’s several times more popular than your other adventure stories, “The Lantern” and The First Light of Dawn. Why do you think that is?
Experience? The First Light of Dawn was only my second story, and I was still learning how to write (caveat: I’m still learning how to write). I think certain stories simply have a larger prospective audience. A crossover with Skyrim, a few months after Skyrim came out and Fallout: Equestria was ending, was bound to be more popular than a clumsy-but-well-meaning first attempt at an adventure.
5. The Wind Thief has three memorable and very different fight scenes: one for each of the cursed brothers. The first was similar to a regular boss fight from Skyrim: attack, dodge, use a shout, attack some more while it’s staggered. The other battles had different strategies: the giant spider blinds Twilight right at the start, so she can’t just smoosh it, and the sorcerer is immortal, so no amount of stabbing will work. How did you adapt the combat system of Skyrim so that it worked well for a novel? And how did you work the fight scenes into the story so they were fun and advanced the plot and character development?
It turns out that writing combat is hard. Writing combat based on a video game is even harder.
Take the Legend of Zelda. Most boss monsters have a special attack Link has to dodge. Link then strikes some special part of their body, stunning them, then runs in and wallops on them while they recover. Repeat 3x times, collect your Heart Container. Countless games use this same format.
You can’t write a scene like that. It’s so unrealistic it would destroy the reader’s sense of immersion. Instead you have to write a combat scene from the ground up, shaped by the source material that inspired you. So Sly has shouts and her bow and her sword, and Twilight is pretty capable with her fireball spell, but they’re not used in the willy-nilly fashion of the game. Sly doesn’t have HP or MP; if she takes a blow from that huge axe, she is going to die. You can’t just have characters trading hits like they do in a video game. Each injury has to be accounted for and shapes the outcome of the entire scene.
The most important part of the battles for me was what they showed us about the characters. Ideally, your hero shouldn’t get in a fight with the villain and then win simply because she’s stronger. The hero should have to struggle to win, either by sacrificing something, using her brains, or making some difficult choice.
All three of the brothers are vastly stronger than Sly or Twilight, on top of being nigh-immortal (or actually immortal for one of them). They have to work together, use their heads and take chances in order to win.
6. What do you think of video games as a storytelling medium? Is there anything storytelling-related that you wish video games did more of, and is there anything that you think novelists can learn from video games?
I think they’re great. We’re blessed to live in an age with Indy games like Braid or Journey that are literal works of art. The fact that they are playable works of art is almost beside the point.
More mainstream games tend to sacrifice artistry and storytelling for the sake of playability, but even there we see strokes of genius. Shadow of the Colossus, Mass Effect, and The Last of Us were all mass-market games that stood out as having good stories in addition to being enjoyable games.
I do wish more video games would treat their players intelligently. Stories can be subtle, filled with nuance, and still have power.
7. Do you have any advice for people writing an adventure or a crossover?
I would tell them to decide, right away, what the essential parts of each half of the crossover are. Is it the setting? Characters? Idea? Events? Once you know what you want to include in the crossover, you can write an original story incorporating those things from the ground up. This tends to be much more appealing than the two most common (and, generally, poor) types of crossover: a story rewritten with ponies as the main characters, or a literal mixing of two worlds (i.e. Master Chief! In Equestria!) Kkat took a setting from the Fallout universe and introduced it to the MLP universe, and if you can do as well as she did, you’re doing something right.
8. How do you know when what you’ve written is good?
Feedback. You need to be willing to show your stuff to people who will critique it. The fact is, almost nothing I write is good until other writers tell me what I’ve done wrong. Then I go back and fix it, and eventually I’ll get something I’m happy with.
9. In one your comments, you said that you love the use of theme and motif in fiction and wish more authors would attempt it, but that it requires a deft hand, lest it squish the rest of your story. Could you elaborate on that? And how did you manage it in The Wind Thief?
Theme and motif are an excellent way for authors who already grasp the basics of writing – the mechanics, the narrative arc, the characterization – to add a new level of sophistication to their work. Going back to Kkat and Fallout: Equestria, she is constantly using the memory orbs as both a device to advance the plot and also as a motif: memory and the past are LittlePip’s enemies just as much as Red Eye and The Goddess. Her ultimate victory isn’t just over the villains arrayed against her, but against the past itself. Her occasional refrain, “Do better,” is a hint of this.
The Wind Thief’s theme is about the importance of choice. The Wind’s Eye, a magical jewel that grants wishes, is perhaps the most perfect expression of choice. With it you can have literally anything that you want. This is not necessarily a good thing, though; almost every villain in the story made the wrong choice when they had the Wind’s Eye, and that choice destroyed them. The few heroes who use it managed to make the right choices, but every one of them died as well. Every major event in the story is driven by wishes and the choices they represent, though all but a few of these wishes occur off-screen, and all but one occurred hundreds of years in the past.
The climax of the story isn’t Sly defeating the final guardian of the tomb; it’s the choice she makes afterward, when the Wind’s Eye is in her possession.
A motif is any recurring element with symbolic importance. In The Wind Thief it is the perpetual winter that accompanies the dragons, both past and present. This also serves to tie the story back to the game, which of course takes place on a frozen, snowbound continent.
This is definitely one I've been holding off on for far too long, I think I will move it up to my "read immediately next" queue.
Don't get me wrong, I can't wait for The Wind Thief's sequel, and however many more stories following Sly's adventures Cold ends up writing beyond that... but I wouldn't mind a sequel to First Light of Dawn, either.
Interesting words expressed with the concept of a motif. I read part of The Wind Thief, but, because I'm me, I never finished it. God, I am the worst at reading anything. Also, SlyLight? I did not see any of that coming from what I recall reading (up to something with a spider and cutting part of Twilight's mane).
In any case, when I read about motif, I've never been entirely convinced it's always a real thing per se. It is a thing, but not quite as literary as many say. 'Twas always my opinion that a motif essentially boiled down to "this is a cool idea that I like; I should make more of it appeared overall". Say, in Pedro Páramo, the motif of memory and echoes is the same as that of FoE: memories and the echoes of the past are as hostile to Juan Preciado as they are to the people who were harmed in those memories. The ghosts of those memories haunt him, curse him, trick him, and fascinate him all at the same time, even after they kill him and he's buried by those ghosts in a grave with some woman. It has its shared elements with FoE
(For the record, I love how everyone speaks of Fallout Equestria like it's our fandom's... how of I say with without being insulting...? Like it's our fandom's literary equivalent to Hemingway, the kind of story Brony scholars debate the true meaning of as they find all the symbolism and stuff. I just found this funny, but the story is undoubtedly awesome. Better, in my opinion, than the established "classics", if only because the "classics" are kinda boring for the most part.)
So, when I think of motif, I often don't think of it as if it were something too conscious. "I want to have Sparkler Unicorn Muffins as a motif in my story!" No. It's just something that occurs because the author thinks its cool or, often, it's just a tick of how they think. Like, when I look back and think of that story of mine, I could easily point out the motif of eyes, how much Jericho thinks of eyes, how some characters (EG, "Pudge Farks") are only described by their eyes, how Jericho goes on and on about a pony's eyes sometimes (note how often he thinks about Cards' red eyes when she's around), and how Jericho even loses an eye. And, truthfully, there was a point when I realized that I was doing this, and thought it was neat, so decided not to fux therewith.
So, there's my ten cents, Amacita of the seven sloganeeringly elongated pies. Catch on the story side of things, aye?